Neither is it especially helpful to consult one of the many holier-than-thou self-righteous leftists out there who use "neoliberal" as their placeholder of choice. Since every day brings a new republican atrocity, today it comes out that trump withheld military assistance to Ukraine in order to get Paul Manafort out of hot water and smear Joe Biden, it is basically hopeless to try and reason with them. In other words, politicizing foreign policy is the latest realm of republican ratfcking (of course, you'd have to forget about Nixon sabotaging peace talks in Vietnam to get elected, Reagan buttering up the Ayatollah to keep the hostages in Iran to get elected, Bush jr. starting wars of aggression to get reelected, and trump using Russian intelligence to get elected). Not by coincidence it seems is this editorial in the NYTimes written by the authors of How Democracies Die about constitutional hardball by republican authoritarians. Hot take: it's not fear that drives republican hardball, it's hate. The Republican Party could abandon its racism, its authoritarianism, its hatred of science, its embrace of religious fundamentalism, and its mafia-esque mantra of loot everything and burn the place down tomorrow and become a moderate conservative party that does well in most of the world. But as Driftglass likes to say "they can't abandon the monster they made" and have to, like Hitler, keep pedaling the bicycle forward or fall.
No, all of the worthwhile discussion is going on on the left. Which is why it is so disconcerting to read so many articles like this one in CounterPunch:
But this [inauthenticity of "the state-capitalist and corporate-captive Democratic Party"] is nothing remotely new. Yes, Virginia, the Democrats have an authenticity problem, you betchya. The late left Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin memorably labeled the Democrats as, get this, “the Inauthentic Opposition” twelve years ago. “Should Democrats somehow be elected,” Wolin prophesied in his book Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, 2007), they would do nothing to “alter significantly the direction of society” or “substantially revers[e] the drift rightwards. … The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts,” Wolin wrote, “points to the crucial fact that for the poor, minorities, the working class and anti-corporatists there is no opposition party working on their behalf.” The corporatist Democrats would work to “marginalize any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.”If I had all the time in the world I could probably not comb through this piece by Paul Street thoroughly to call out all the ways in which is it utterly unhelpful in the present situation. But Mr. Street is just one of the latest in a long line of "wailers" who have been lobbing bombs into responsible efforts to contain the authoritarian menace. Arthur M. Schlesinger jr. coined the term 70 years ago and though the interests wailers represent have changed, the essential idea is that writers for leftist periodicals can snipe Democrats when they fail to live up to the purest ideal of progressivism as embodied by whomever is holding the pen? As I put it eight years ago in the face of the Democratic "shellacking" by apathy:
Now, in 1949 there were real communists and fellow travelers trying tenaciously to undermine democracy and the constitution. Schlesinger's book was an exhortation to get the "noncommunist left" together with the "nonfascist right" on issues directly related to the core of the American idea: rule of law, free elections, free press, constitutional rights of individuals, and sovereignty so we can argue as Americans first about what is best for the country. There were never more than a handful of these guys taking marching orders from Moscow and they never came close to taking over an entire political party in this country. But at the time, no one really knew how successful communist subversives could be in hijacking the message. Anthony Burgess used the idea of communist propaganda infiltrating free societies to undermine them in A Clockwork Orange if you can see where I am going with this.In The Vital Center Schlesinger made a distinction between doughface progressive "wailers" and radical democratic "doers" in our liberal tradition. The doughface in his conception was "a democratic man with totalitarian principles" who runs from responsibility and freedom, surrendering the chaos of liberty for the protective embrace of communist discipline. In our contemporary situation, voters largely abdicated the responsibility for involvement after electing Barack Obama, and once in he feared actually being responsible for the consequences of big decisions. This explains why to some degree why his cabinet was stocked with doughfaces like geithner and summers, progressive men with banker's principles. It seemed that the entire Democratic governing coalition was held captive by lack of vision and fear. Fear of trying something different, fear of being held responsible for the radical actions necessary to get our society back on track.Schlesinger's wailer as well, was a liberal Utopian who was afraid of the real world. They simply wanted to criticize but not actually change things, much better to craft the perfect rhetorical flourish to condemn greed, oppression, and the like. Therefore, wailers don't actually want power. Combine this with the decay of intermediate forces, unions, clubs, even party structures and you can see how someone that perhaps started out with principles could become unmoored when faced with that kind of fear. Without intermediate forces to support liberals once in power, or threaten them when they waver it is no wonder they fall prey to special interests.
America was inoculated against foreign propaganda during the Cold War enough that McCarthyism was never more than a crude partisan cudgel employed by republicans to political advantage. But students of history know that fear of being labeled "soft on communism" affected the republic in many ways and that crude partisan weapon could mutate into "soft on crime", "soft on terrorism" and now its ridiculous, inbred, spawn of republicans branding every Democrat as a "radical socialist."
So the players have completely changed roles in contemporary America. The noncommunist left was never really in danger of being supplanted by an insurgent authoritarianism. Unlike the nonfascist right that has basically become extinct, supplanted by the laughingly named "conservative movement" that now more or less openly takes orders from Moscow and welcomes foreign interference in America through a social media network that Burgess could never have imagined.
I had a hard time understanding then, why leftist wailers still existed. They seem to exist in a kind of hipster-esque world where "I was into universal healthcare and saving the environment before it was cool". I have no problem with their ideological goals, it's the tactics and "perfect rhetorical flourish" every thinkpiece needs to out-edgy their colleagues and strike awesome savior anti-hero poses that is the problem. No one likes a braggart, and these wailers just look like bullies when they criticize Democrats for being wimps and not serving the causes of du jour progressivism as much as they demand while doing nothing to actively advance those goals. Just sit on the sidelines and avoid responsibility. But at least they are not acting on marching orders from a foreign adversary, and the purity tests did not discourage a whole lot of people from running for office and working hard to get new and better Democrats elected. Beyond personal self-aggrandizement and "building a brand" to "go viral" on the same social media that Russian and domestic right wingers use to undermine legitimate and responsible politics, there never seemed a larger, ulterior motive.
Then I started reading about authoritarianism, and discovered that there is a left-wing variety. Left-wing authoritarians need something to rebel against, in perpetuity. This species of rebel does those things above because they want to be king among the roaming bands of weaker rogues and rebels. You can see the problem with this and why they always come of as so abrasive, no rebel wants to be led. Therefore, you get lots of little atomized cells on the left that agree on probably 90% of a platform but can't seem to work together. And why Schlesinger argued that freedom and democracy often dissipate focus and energy for change, while authoritarian lockstep followers can advance an awful tyrant's lust for power and wealth by concentrating that focus.
Concentrating our energy for reform is the only hope to stave off the descent into madness and tyranny that Doughfacedonny and republicans crave. It is also why the two party system, for all its faults, is still the best way of organizing and concentrating that energy. It has not been this clear since the Civil War that one party is full of bad guys and the other party is the good guys. As DG and BG always say during their podcast "one party wants to expand health care and the other party puts babies in cages". I am suspicious of anyone exhibiting "BernieBro" tendencies and tearing down the one vehicle for focusing energy against authoritarianism without doing anything to defend our freedom. We need to organize and work together to fix the damn army we have, before its too late. Yes, the Democratic Party is a hodge-podge of wimps, has beens, and never weres; what are you doing to fix that?
